Variation’s Long Tentacles


Today, most design engineers don't pay much attention to variation. It's generally considered to be a manufacturing problem. Even within the fab, various job functions are segmented enough that variation in one part of the process, such as the photomask shop, doesn't necessarily come to the attention of the people doing deposition and etch or those polishing the wafers. But increasingly, ... » read more

Boosting Analog Reliability


Aveek Sarkar, vice president of Synopsys’ Custom Compiler Group, talks about challenges with complex design rules, rigid design methodologies, and the gap between pre-layout and post-layout simulation at finFET nodes. https://youtu.be/JRYlYJ31LLw » read more

Tightening Margins On Heat


Stephen Crosher, CEO of Moortec, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about the impact of more accurate measurements on power, performance and reliability of designs from 40nm all the way down to 3nm. https://youtu.be/VnX-TiaMVmI » read more

Testing AI Systems


AI is booming. It's coming to a device near you—maybe even inside of you. And AI will be used to design, manufacture and even ship those devices, regardless of what they are, where they are used, or how they are transported. The big questions now are whether these systems work, for how long—and what do those metrics even mean? An AI system, or AI-enhanced system, is supposed to adapt ove... » read more

Chasing Reliability In Automotive Electronics


Assuring reliability in automotive electronics has set off a scramble across the semiconductor supply chain and unearthed a list of issues for which there is insufficient data, a lack of well-defined standards, and inconsistent levels of expertise. Reliable functional safety that spans 18 to 20 years of service in harsh environments, or under constant use with autonomous taxis or trucks, is ... » read more

A Longer Life For LED Power Electronics


One of the greater challenges with LED lighting is the electronic driver’s robustness to normally occurring transients or power surges in the network. Many everyday examples have shown that the active electronics in the light sources find it hard to handle the effects in a use environment, in which incandescent bulbs and lamps with passive electronics have functioned fine for decades. A new p... » read more

Making Sure A Heterogeneous Design Will Work


An explosion of various types of processors and localized memories on a chip or in a package is making it much more difficult to verify and test these devices, and to sign off with confidence. In addition to timing and clock domain crossing issues, which are becoming much more difficult to deal with in complex chips, some of the new devices are including AI, machine learning or deep learning... » read more

Taming NBTI To Improve Device Reliability


Negative-bias temperature instability is a growing issue at the most advanced process nodes, but it also has proven extremely difficult to tame using conventional approaches. That finally may be starting to change. NBTI is an aging mechanism in field-effect transistors that leads to a change of the characteristic curves of a transistor during operation. The result can be a drift toward unint... » read more

Prediction of SRAM Reliability Under Mechanical Stress Induced by Harsh Environments


On the example of a 28nm SRAM array, this work presents a novel reliability study which takes into account the effect of externally applied mechanical stress in circuit simulations. This method is able to predict the bit failures caused by the stress via the piezoresistive effect. The stability of each single SRAM cell is simulated using static noise margin. Finally, the whole array’s behavio... » read more

The Impact of Domain Crossing on Safety


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss problems associated with domain crossings with Alex Gnusin, design verification technologist for Aldec; Pete Hardee, director, product management for Cadence; Joe Hupcey, product manager and verification product technologist for Mentor, a Siemens Business; Sven Beyer, product manager design verification for OneSpin; and Godwin Maben, applications en... » read more

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